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Wednesday, March 19, 2014

My Journey Home: 6 Things that Led This Evangelical to the Catholic Church

It
was the end of the spring semester of our senior year at the
evangelical school Wheaton College when my wife and I plus four other
students stood in front of the congregation at St. Michael parish, said
we believed everything taught by the Catholic Church to be revealed by
God, received the Body and Blood of Our Lord, and left the Mass full
members of the Mystical Body of Christ.That was almost four years ago. Just last month, I flew out to Ohio to tell Marcus Grodi, host of the EWTN show The Journey Home, and his viewers what convinced me to do it. The episode aired yesterday evening and can be viewed above.My
interview is not an apologetic for the Catholic faith. I point to some
arguments, but don’t delve too much into the details. I cite personal
reasons and accidents of my personal history that ended up being
influential. It’s thoroughly my story, but one I hope could nonetheless
strengthen Catholics in their faith - and maybe pique the interest of
non-Catholics.But if it’s too long to watch (it’s almost an hour!), here’s a list of 6 key factors that led me to the Church.1) JesusI wanted to follow Jesus. How am I supposed to do that? This was my driving question.I
wasn’t content with following Jesus on my own terms, I wanted to
“worship in spirit and in truth.” (John 4.24) This compelled me to read
Scripture, study Church history, and carefully examine serious claims to
the Christian faith - which included the Catholic Church.2) Faithful CatholicsIt’s
easy for Protestants to see so many nominal Catholics and write the
Church off as “dead religion.” There are certainly lots of nominal
Catholics (there are lots of nominal Protestants, too), but from my time
in Catholic schools growing up I also knew there were many faithful
Catholics.I’m
not talking about Catholics who had the whole Bible memorized or could
explain every Catholic dogma. I’m talking about Catholics who sincerely
wanted to follow Christ, who took Scripture seriously, and had a real
prayer life.That
didn’t prove the Catholic faith - there are faithful adherents to any
religion - but it did mean I couldn’t write off Catholicism so easily.

3) The MassAs
a student at Catholic schools 1st through 12th grade, I went to Mass
regularly from an early age. With so much exposure, I lacked many common
Protestant prejudices about it. I knew that, far from being some sort
of dead ritual, the Mass was a beautiful, mysterious, sacred thing - and
that was before I understood the theology of the Mass or believed in
the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist.When
I left my Catholic high school and went off to Wheaton College, I no
longer was being forced to go to Mass for the first time in a long time.
I’d only go to Mass if I wanted to. I wasn’t Catholic, so why would I? But I couldn’t shake it.
I found myself regularly feeling drawn to go back to Mass. Looking
back, I may have been Catholic spiritually before I was Catholic
doctrinally (confirming the old principle lex orandi, lex credendi).4) The BibleAs
an evangelical Christian, I was already convinced that the Bible is the
Word of God. When I started reading it seriously for the first time in
high school, I was surprised that it didn’t always seem to line up with
what I was being taught by my fellow evangelicals.Saved
by faith alone? Jesus and Paul seemed to talk a lot about being judged
by how we live. (Mt 25.31-46, Rom 2.6-11, et al.) We only need to
confess our sins straight to God? Then why did Jesus give his Apostles
the power to give and withhold forgiveness? (John 20.22-23)And where did Scripture teach sola scriptura?
Since Scripture doesn’t tell us which books are inspired, how did
Christians determine the canon? And what happens when sincere Christian
intractably disagree on how Scripture should be interpreted?Evangelical Protestantism didn’t seem to account for all of Scripture, and sola scriptura didn’t seem to work. Catholicism, on the other hand, had good answers to all of these questions.

5) The Early ChurchChristianity
is not a religion based on human discovery or insight into the
universe, it’s based on divine revelation given to humanity at a
particular point in history, namely, through Christ and his Apostles in
the 1st century. This means the true Christian faith comes from the 1st
century, not, say, the 16th century.The
story of history I had been told by Protestants was that Jesus, his
Apostles, and the early Church were basically Protestant in their
beliefs and practices, that things were slowly corrupted into
Catholicism during the medieval period, and that the Protestant
Reformers took things back to how they were in the early Church. The
Catholic story of history is of course that Catholicism was the faith
from the very beginning and that Protestantism is a later innovation.In studying the early Church fathers, whose writings are available online for free, it was clear to me that the early Church was indeed Catholic and that the most important aspects of Protestantism were later innovations foreign to most of Christian history.6) MoralityThe
last major factor I’ll mention here was morality. The Church’s social
teachings are an underappreciated gift to the world, and the Church is
well-known for her strong pro-life stance, but the teaching that had the
biggest impact on both me and my wife is one of her most controversial:
her rejection of contraception.We
got engaged our junior year with the plan to get married the summer
before our senior year. While researching what kind of contraception to
use, we decided to give Humanae Vitae a read just to be more informed about the issue in general, and were surprised to find its arguments very compelling.I’ve explained the full story of our conversion on this issue elsewhere,
but suffice it to say that once we were both convinced that
contraception was immoral, it greatly shook our confidence in
Protestantism. With the exception of individuals and small communities,
virtually all Protestants abandoned the long-standing historic Christian
opposition to contraception in the mid-20th century. How could
Protestantism be true Christianity if it couldn’t even maintain it’s own
moral teachings, but instead had accepted grave sexual perversion?
Compare that to the miracle of the Catholic papacy in the 20th century
maintaining the traditional stance despite overwhelming pressure from
both within and without the Church to change it, and it makes a person
wonder if the pope really is the successor of St. Peter, the Rock on
whom Christ said he would build his Church.Back to the BeginningAll
of these factors, and others, coalesced until it was clear that I
needed to join the Catholic Church. Which brings me back to the first
reason I listed above, Jesus. It wasn’t that I simply thought joining
the Catholic Church was a good thing for me to do, and it wasn’t
just something I happned to want to do (though of course it was both of
those things in part); joining the Catholic Church was what I was
convinced I had to do if I wanted to follow Jesus.And
I did want to follow Jesus. So I joined the Catholic Church. And in the
last four years, praise the Lord, I’ve only been further confirmed that
it was the right thing to do.

Brantly Millegan is an Assistant Editor for Aleteia. He is also Co-Founder and Co-Editor of Second Nature, Co-Director of the International Institute for the Study of Technology and Christianity,
and is working on a M.A. in Theology at the St. Paul Seminary School of
Divinity. He lives with his wife and children in South St. Paul, MN.
His personal website is brantlymillegan.com.

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